The Sunflowers Along Highway 34

That spring Wyatt had come home from second grade with a sunflower seed in a paper cup. Every child in his class planted one. His sprouted first. His teacher let him bring it home on the last day of school.

He set it on the kitchen windowsill and watched it like it was television. Every morning he measured it against a ruler from my sewing basket.

“Grandma,” he said one morning in May, “how much would somebody pay for a sunflower?”

I said I didn’t know. Maybe a couple of dollars at the farmers market over in Yuma.

“What about three dollars?”

“Maybe three dollars for a nice one.”

He thought about that for a full day. Then he came to me with a plan he had written on the back of a spelling test. He wanted to plant sunflowers along the fence and sell them at the end of our drive.

He wanted a bike. Not a new one. There was a used one at the thrift store in town, red with a bent fender, for forty dollars. He had already been to look at it twice.

I could have just bought him that bike. Forty dollars wasn’t going to break me. But I had raised his father on a farm, and I knew there’s a kind of proud a boy gets from earning a thing that he never gets from being handed it.

So I said yes. I bought him a packet of seeds at the co-op, the tall single-stem kind and a packet of the branching kind that keeps throwing new flowers all summer. Eleven dollars for both. He paid me back out of his piggy bank in quarters.

We planted on the last Saturday in May. I showed him how deep, about an inch, and how far apart, about a foot. He did every single one himself. Sixty seeds along the fence, as straight as a boy can make a row.

I chose the fence line because it was the only strip of our yard that wasn’t already lawn or garden. I never thought about whose fence it was. It was half ours. I’d lived beside it for forty-seven years.

Every morning before the heat came on, he filled that coffee can at the outside spigot and walked the row. It took him nine trips. I timed him once. Twenty-two minutes, every day, without being told.

They came up in about a week. He knew which ones came up first. He named a few of them, which I didn’t have the heart to tell him was a mistake.

By the middle of June they were up past his knees. Some of the branching ones were starting to put out side shoots. He was already planning where the stand would go.

That Saturday I was standing at the kitchen sink rinsing the breakfast dishes when I saw Merle Hatch walking along the fence with a backpack sprayer.

I didn’t think anything of it. Merle had walked that fence with a sprayer every June for as long as I’d known him. I figured he was doing his own side, the way he always did.

I went to the grocery store in town that morning and then to visit a friend from church who’d had her hip done. I didn’t walk the fence. Wyatt was with me. It was a busy, ordinary day.